To understand what Gracenote does, think about the artist, album, and song info (also known as metadata) it provides for every form of digital music from old-school CDs to the latest smartphone music streaming app. When you glance at your car radio to get this info or request a certain selection by name via voice recognitionwhether you're listening to an iTunes playlist or Internet radio, a popular artist or an obscure indie bandchances are someone at Gracenote personally coded the metadata.

I'm not pointing out Gracenote's announcement of hitting the 50-million mark to give the company a (well-deserved) pat on the back. The larger significance is in what this milestone represents: tens of millions of drivers now haveand perhaps more importantly, have come to expectthis kind of information and technology at their fingertips.

That Gracenote has hit the 50-million mark also indicates how quickly such tech features and particularly music sources have proliferated in the car over the past few years. It's also surprising considering the company was only at about half that number just a little over two years ago.

Gracenote started out supplying music metadata that would match CDs used in cars, when clunky discs were the sole digital source in the dash. Then came satellite radio, iPods, hard disc drives, USB drives and SD cards loaded with MP3s, and finally smartphone and streaming music services.

But Gracenote's growth in automotive has skyrocketed because its services have spread to more vehiclesfrom luxury cars to more mainstream, high-volume modelson the coattails of this explosion of digital audio sources in the dash. And this trend, plus drivers' appetite for tech in the car, shows no sign of slowing down.

Tech geeks and Star Trek fans will also be interested in the backstory of Gracenote's initial entry into the car. It began when company co-founder and CTO Ty Roberts met with a Pioneer executive in Japan. The exec was a Trekkie and fascinated with Captain Kirk being able to call up music on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise simply by using voice commands. At the time voice recognition was first making its way into car stereos, and the exec told Roberts that his goal was for the company's radios to work the same way.

Roberts returned to the company's headquarters in the Bay Area and announced to the surprise of his product team that he had promised the Pioneer exec that Gracenote would deliver on his goalin less than 90 days. In these pre-iPod days, Gracenote had experience using its technology to recognize CDs inserted into a PC's disc drive to match it with music metadata, but the car was uncharted territory. Still, in less than three months it solved the problem by developing a database that culled the most popular songs by regions of the world rather than including the entire database in the dash.

That technology eventually led to today's 50 million number, as well as the phonetic database used today to call up music using in-car systems such as Ford Sync, even though the number of songs in the company's database has grown exponentially. So has car owners' expectations of having music metadata at their fingertips, even if they originally had no idea they even wanted it or how it got to the dashboards.

Doug Newcomb is a recognized expert on the subject of car technology within the auto industry and among the automotive and general media, and a frequent speaker at automotive and consumer electronics industry events. Doug began his career in 1988 at the car stereo trade publication Mobile Electronics, before serving as editor of the leading consumer magazines covering the topic, Car Audio and Electronics and Car Stereo Review/Mobile Entertainment/Road & Track Road Gear, from 1989 to 2005. In 2005 Doug started his own company, Newcomb Communications...
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